The lectures:

Tommies queued in their hundreds to visit brothels in the First
World War. Dr Clare Makepeace explores this little-discussed aspect of the war.
She uncovers soldiers' reasons for visiting brothels, their reactions to them
and the prostitutes, and how they dealt with the potential consequences:
venereal disease. The findings give us fresh insight into what it meant to be a
British man at war.

Staff and students at the UCL Institute of Archaeology have been
involved in the investigative conservation of objects excavated from Western
Front trenches. Some of these objects were associated with unidentified human
remains thought to be of soldiers killed in battles between 1914 and 1918, and
provided important information for their identification. Others provided more
questions than answers, but also shed light on the reality of life and death in
the trenches.

Trench warfare protected combatants
from many injuries, but left the head exposed, producing a
massive demand for experimental facial reconstructive surgery. WW1 is
acknowledged as the first ‘industrial scale’ war, but it has taken a century to
stumble upon the concept of industrial
scale tissue production. This very 21st century idea can be
traced back to WW1 and the clinical pressures produced by industrial scale,
non-lethal trauma.

This year is the centenary of the outbreak
of the First World War. By examining the lives of figures such as Henry Gwyn
Jeffreys Moseley and Fritz Haber, this talk will show how scientists on all
sides were swept up in the tide of patriotism, militarism and nationalism,
making contributions, some tragically brief, some devastatingly effective, to
the waging of war. And what of the long-lasting effects? While some saw the
Great War as an irreparable crisis of modern civilisation, with science as a
symbol of inhumanity, others saw science as a internationalist project capable of
healing wounds.